11 - France, iii : 1600–1640

Summary

MUSIC in France during the seventeenth century, particularly during the first half, displays a character distinctly different from that of its artistic rival IItaly, where at the turn of the century Jacopo Peri and others were creating the foundations of opera and where Giulio Caccini had developed a style of singing that could convey the passionate intensity of this new dramatic form. In contrast, French music appears decidedly conservative, despite the opportunity to embrace the Italian innovations afforded by the marriage of Henri iv of France to Maria de’ Medici of Florence. After becoming queen of France, Maria de’ Medici invited Caccini and other leading Italian musicians to Paris, where, however, only faint traces of their influence are apparent in the music written during or after their visits. Later political developments created such hostility towards Italian music that its cause in France stood no chance of success until near the end of the century when unexpected social changes opened the way for it again. Nevertheless, Mersenne in his Harmonie universelle (1636) urged French singers to study in IItaly, or at least to read Caccini's Le nuove musiche (1601) and thereby “add that more pathetic quality of the Italians to the beauty, purity, and delicacy of ornamentation that our musicians perform with such grace when, having a good voice, they have learned to sing from the great masters.” What impact Italian music had upon French music in the early seventeenth century thus seems to have been largely in the field of performance rather than in composition, and even here it would seem that it did little to disguise the essential character of French music.

The focus of almost all significant artistic creation in early-seventeenth-century France was the court, which, in the period that concerns us, saw the short reign of the first of the Bourbon kings Henri iv (assassinated in 1610), the Regency of his widow Maria de’ Medici and the beginning of the reign of their son Louis xiii, particularly troubled in the early years because of his mother's reluctance to allow him to govern.